9.10, which will be codenamed Karmic Koala. The developers plan to
bring cloud capabilities to Ubuntu's server edition, boost startup
performance on the desktop, and continue work on the distro's netbook
flavor.
Ubuntu adheres to a time-based six-month release cycle. The next major
release—version 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope—is moving towards
feature freeze and is scheduled for launch in April. Ubuntu 9.10,
which will be the next release after Jaunty, is planned for October.
The Ubuntu server edition, which was initially launched in 2005, has
been steadily gaining ground in the enterprise, but still lags in
adoption behind competing offerings from Red Hat and Novell.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has been investing considerable
effort into making Ubuntu a first-class server distro. During the
development cycle for Karmic, Canonical aims to strengthen the server
edition by introducing enhanced support for cloud computing.
One plan is to create a set of standard Ubuntu server Amazon Machine
Image (AMI) profiles that will provide a starting point for creating
specialized images. This will help to simplify deployment of Ubuntu on
Amazon's EC2 platform. The developers also intend to integrate support
for Eucalyptus, an open source framework for implementing a
self-hosted elastic computing cluster. The Eucalyptus project, which
is developed by UCSB, will enable organizations to get many of the
advantages of elastic computing in their own data centers, including
the ability to scale down power consumption when load is low.
"A savvy Koala knows that the best way to conserve energy is to go to
sleep, and these days even servers can suspend and resume, so imagine
if we could make it possible to build a cloud computing facility that
drops its energy use virtually to zero by napping in the midday heat,
and waking up when there's work to be done," Shuttleworth wrote in a
mailing list post. "No need to drink at the energy fountain when
there's nothing going on. If we get all of this right, our Koala will
help take the edge off the bear market."
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